Ever heard of the "gunslinger's gait"? It's how Putin and other ex KGB men walk

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Paris (AFP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin walks with a curious "gunslinger's gait" -- a reduced swing in his right arm which he may have acquired through KGB weapons training, an unusual study published Monday said.

The research, published in the British medical journal The BMJ, was written by a team of neurologists in Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands.

Video footage shows that when Putin walks, his left arm swings normally but his right arm barely moves.

But their investigations turned up an intriguing alternative explanation in the form of a training manual used by the former Soviet intelligence service, the KGB.

The manual, which they had translated into Dutch, instructs operatives to keep their weapon in their right hand close to their chest and move forward with one side -- usually the left -- "turned somewhat in the direction of movement."

The idea behind this approach is to let the agent draw a gun as quickly as possible when confronted with a foe.

Wondering whether prolonged and intensive training in this method could explain Putin's gait, as he was a KGB operative in the Cold War, the team carried out a trawl on YouTube for videos of other Russian officials.
The researchers were "stunned" by what they saw, said Bastiaan Bloem, a professor of movement disorder neurology at Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who led the study.

They also found the characteristic walk in Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, in two former defence ministers -- Anatoly Serdyukov and Sergei Ivanov -- and in Anatoly Sidorov, a senior military commander.

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